I have a 320Gb (Seagate) as my Win 7 OS drive (AHCI). My MB is a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R and I want to add another 320 Gb drive and Raid (stripe) them.

I have clean installed and Activated Win 7 (Home Premium) 3 times already, so I suspect that a 4th Install will result in a non-activation problem.

Question:

Is it possible to convert the original 320 to raid and retain the drive's contents, and then add the second drive and stripe them together. I thought I read somewhere that this is possible.

Any HC Input would be appreciated. I just hate this activation crap.

You could try creating a system image using windows 7 backup and restore. I am not sure if that will ask you to reactivate or not but it will save all your data into a single backup. Which I assume you should be able to restore back to the raid once you have it configured.

You could try creating a system image using windows 7 backup and restore. I am not sure if that will ask you to reactivate or not but it will save all your data into a single backup. Which I assume you should be able to restore back to the raid once you have it configured.

If I create the system Image, then the system files would contain the setup settings for a ACHI Drive setup. After restoring the image to a RAID0 Drive configuration, wouldn't the RAID Drivers be replaced with the ACHI Drivers, thereby corrupting the install after it re-boots.

If I create the system Image, then the system files would contain the setup settings for a ACHI Drive setup. After restoring the image to a RAID0 Drive configuration, wouldn't the RAID Drivers be replaced with the ACHI Drivers, thereby corrupting the install after it re-boots.

I am not sure.. I don't think so but I can't say for certain. Since you perform this restore using the Windows 7 Disk I can only assume that it will use the proper drivers. As you should have to select the disk you are restoring to. If not you would have to reinstall the HDD drivers maybe using the windows repair?